Virtual Library

The release of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on C.I.A. interrogation tactics added a new chapter to the national conversation on the government's use of torture.

A variety of social movements are coalescing into transnational networks that oppose the polarizing in-equalities, unaccountable corporate power, and declining social and environmental health of free trade. In the process of sharing grievances and resources, many movements are forging cross-border networks and shaping the beginnings of transnational civil societies. This research discusses one network and its efforts to build a transnational civil society, the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras (CJM), a coalition endeavoring to reform exploitative labor relations in Mexico's export processing sector. Using thirty extended interviews, movement documents, and notes from participant observation from 1996 to 2002, the research analyzes the problems and possibilities of transnational movement coalitions as they struggle for reform. Borrowing from scholarship on transnational social movements and coalition building, this research makes two contributions. First, liberal capitalism paradoxically both enables the growth and limits the power of democratic development in transnational civil societies, like national civil societies before it. Second, despite the fact that the CJM has yet to overcome internal disunity and external forces of social control, it shows how coalition building creates transnational cultures of solidarity that inspire movement networks to survive and explore new opportunities for social change.

The tension between public health and individual rights raises key questions in the face of public health crises such as tuberculosis (TB) and Ebola: What are the circumstances that warrant the obligatory detention of individuals with an infectious disease as a measure of protecting the general public? What are the implications for the protection of privacy while managing and controlling the spread of diseases such as HIV? What must be done to obtain informed consent for research and epidemiological studies that benefit public health? Recent handling of TB and Ebola patients in West Africa captures the tensions inherent in the attempt to balance public health and individual rights. In this Perspective, we outline our experiences in handling Petition 329 of 2014, a constitutional petition filed in the High Court of Kenya in 2010, which sought to challenge the arrest and detention of two TB patients for interrupting their TB treatment.

Using historical analysis of the inclusiveness of Labor Department affirmative action regulations for African‐Americans, American Indians, Asian Americans, Latinos, women, and white ethnics, this article shows that understanding variations in social movement success requires understanding policy‐elite perceptions of the meanings of social movements and the groups they represent. Variation in perceived meanings along dimensions of definition, morality, or threat helps explain the speed of group inclusion, the amount of mobilization needed, and possiblity for failure. Ethnoracial minorities benefited from perceptions of definitional and moral similarity to blacks, but elites perceived women as different definitionally and white ethnics as different definitionally and morally. Policy‐elite perceptions create obstacles for some groups, forcing them to struggle longer and harder for the same policy outcome.

Some images stick out in the collective memory of mankind and become icons for a whole generation. Among the most forceful images of our generation are the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, on 11 September 2001. These attacks revealed a new face of terrorism at the dawn of the 21st century, with new targets and new means, intended to produce many indiscriminate victims and without any concern for the offenders to save their own lives. Since the dramatic events of September 2001, the academic literature has been flooded with books, articles, and reports about terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism, and new forms of violence, mostly from a viewpoint of political science and law. Yet, one can wonder if the attack on the twin towers was fundamentally different from the violent attacks on politicians and political targets by the left-wing terrorist groups of the Rote Armee Fraktion in Germany or the Brigate Rosse in Italy in the 1970s and 1980s of the former century. These groups also used violent means against specific targets, with the objective of

This article offers a trajectory of humanitarian communication, which suggests a clear, though not linear, move from emotion-oriented to post-emotional styles of appealing. Drawing on empirical examples, the article demonstrates that the humanitarian sensibility that arises out of these emerging styles breaks with pity and privileges a short-term and low-intensity form of agency, which is no longer inspired by an intellectual agenda but momentarily engages us in practices of playful consumerism. Whereas this move to the post-emotional should be seen as a reaction to a much-criticized articulation between politics and humanitarianism, which relied on ‘universal’ morality and grand emotion, it is also a response to the intensely mediatized global market in which humanitarian agencies operate today. The article concludes by reflecting on the political and ethical ambivalence at the heart of this new style of humanitarian communication, which offers both the tentative promise of new practices of altruism and the threat of cultural narcissism.

This article examines how judicial human rights in Europe have adopted the security politics that have swept across Europe in recent years and how, through the European Court of Human Rights’ (ECtHR)decision‐making over the veil they have contributed to the precarity of the Muslim woman’s body. While suffering from stigmatization through securitization of the veil (I am using ‘veil’ to describe various garments such as the hijab, niqab and burqa. For the purposes of this article, this is a useful shorthand), covered Muslim women’s (The concept of Muslim women is a misnomer because it suggests that Muslim women constitute a homogeneous group when they are not. Without denying their heterogeneity, its use here is suggestive of the way it is used by securitizing agents and narratives) attempts at strategic human rights litigation against bans on their clothing, including landmark cases such as SAS v. France, have failed. Institutional human rights in Europe have hijacked national governments’ security narratives and thus been complicit in furthering the bodily vulnerability of covered Muslim women by sanctioning the public stripping of their clothing. This transgresses human rights’ fundamental, normative, commitment to preventing bodily wounding. It exposes the conditionality and limitation of judicial human rights and endorses an idealized version of the exposed woman as free and equal. Moreover, by abandoning its role as neutral arbiter or audience, the ECtHR exposes human rights’ ongoing link with neo‐colonialism. The Court’s decision‐making raises the question of how veiled women might mobilize to desecuritize the veil. I suggest a return to the politics of rights combined with the “rebellious cosmopolitanism” resonant with Camus’ politics to mount relentless protests against governance feminism and the Eurocentrism of institutional human rights for a return to “normal politics”.

The United States spends more than twice as much on health care as the average of other developed nations, all of which boast universal coverage. Yet more than 41 million Americans have no health insurance. Many more are underinsured. Confronted by the rising costs and capabilities of modern medicine, other nations have chosen national health insurance (NHI). The United States alone treats health care as a commodity distributed according to the ability to pay, rather than as a social service to be distributed according to medical need. In this market-driven system, insurers and providers compete not so much by increasing quality or lowering costs, but by avoiding unprofitable patients and shifting costs back to patients or to other payers. This creates the paradox of a health care system based on avoiding the sick. It generates huge administrative costs that, along with profits, divert resources from clinical care to the demands of business. In addition, burgeoning satellite businesses, such as consulting firms and marketing companies, consume an increasing fraction of the health care dollar. We endorse a fundamental change in US health care--the creation of an NHI program. Such a program, which in essence would be an expanded and improved version of traditional Medicare, would cover every American for all necessary medical care. An NHI program would save at least 200 billion dollars annually (more than enough to cover all of the uninsured) by eliminating the high overhead and profits of the private, investor-owned insurance industry and reducing spending for marketing and other satellite services. Physicians and hospitals would be freed from the concomitant burdens and expenses of paperwork created by having to deal with multiple insurers with different rules, often designed to avoid payment. National health insurance would make it possible to set and enforce overall spending limits for the health care system, slowing cost growth over the long run. An NHI program is the only affordable option for universal, comprehensive coverage.

Why do certain protests prompt more intervention from the police? And why does the intensity of intervention vary over time? Drawing on analytical approaches in the protest policing literature, and on studies investigating the relationship between civil conflict, public opinion, and state repression, this study examines whether pro-Kurdish events in Turkey are treated more severely than others, and how the policing of these protests changes over time. Based on an original dataset, we analyze more than 10,000 protest events that took place in Turkey between 2000 and 2009. Our findings suggest that compared to others, pro-Kurdish events are more likely to encounter police action, one that particularly involves repressive strategies. We further show that repressive policing in pro-Kurdish events is more pronounced when the Kurdish armed insurgency against the state intensifies. Given that this is the first systematic quantitative study on protest policing in Turkey, it not only tests previously confirmed theories of protest policing, but also makes a theoretical contribution by providing a dynamic notion of threat beyond its situational forms, which builds on the conflict between the Turkish state and the PKK.